One of things I do to make my daily salad a little brighter is to have cool ingredients and flavorful additions to my salad. I usually buy the Starkist Flavor Packs in flavors like ranch, sweet and sour or hickory. It gets a little expensive to buy a packet for each salad if they are not on sale. Depending on the store, I've paid almost $10 for 4 packets. I rather spend my money on things like shoes so I learned to make my own. I started making my own marinated tuna for salads and I have not looked back. It's low in calories, low in salt and high in protein. The process to make it isn't hard and it makes almost three days worth of tuna for my salads. It doesn't always look appetizing in the mason jar but it tastes amazing.
There are three main ways I marinate - with dressing, fresh spices and lemon or with sauces. First, for all the recipes, I take two cans of low sodium tuna, open them and squeeze all the liquid out the can. Keep squeezing until you dont see rivers of liquid coming out the can.
Then, with dressing or sauce, I pour half the dressing in the mason jar, put half the tuna, then pour the rest of the sauce and mix with a fork. I put the lid on and let it marinate for at least 8 hours or overnight before putting it on my salad. With lemon and spices, I put all the tuna in the can, squeeze the juice of one large lemon or two medium sized ones, add a small splash of olive oil for moisture, and put a ton of pepper. I add a little garlic salt and let it sit for maybe 4 hours before adding it to my salad.
I usually fluff the tuna on top of my salad I make the night before and it stays separated when I open the container at lunch the next day. I hope that this recipe helps you save a few bucks and experiment with tuna. A lot of people don't use tuna as thoroughly as it can be used.
